This invention is related in general to the field of telecommunications. More particularly, the invention is related to a system and method for supporting and managing telecommunications services.
In the current telephony environment, when a telecommunications services provider desires to provide a new service to its telephone customers, only the telecommunications equipment manufacturer and vendor has the knowledge and expertise to develop and deploy the new service. Because of past and current telecommunications system architecture and implementation, deploying new services is a slow and time-consuming process. With the advent of the Intelligent Network (IN) and Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN), which include the availability of a Service Creation Environment (SCE), new services may be readily created and provided to the Service Control Point (SCP) for execution, and to the Service Management System (SMS) for management. However, there are many other business functions such as billing, sales, marketing, and customer support, related to deploying a new service, all that may need to support the new service in the same rapid manner as creating and providing those new services to fully deploy the newly-created services.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a master specification of the network resources or a master management information base which combines or integrates the managed object definitions of network resources based on standards bodies, consortia, service providers, and equipment manufacturers and provides access thereto by operation support systems at various levels of management within the network. It is also desirable to provide a toolkit that enables the preparation of the master management information base from the standard management information bases.
In one aspect of the invention, a system for supporting and managing telecommunications services in a telecommunications network includes a management information base builder toolkit for specifying object definitions in an object-oriented framework of a plurality of managed objects that model resources within the telecommunications network. The toolkit is used to construct a master management information base for storing the object definitions of the plurality of managed objects.
In another aspect of the invention, a method for supporting and managing telecommunications services in a telecommunications network includes the steps of specifying object definitions in an object-oriented framework of a plurality of managed objects that model resources within the telecommunications network, and then storing the object definitions of the plurality of managed objects in a master management information base accessible to operation and support systems.
A technical advantage of the present invention is the ability to rapidly deploy services in the telecommunications network by specifying and incorporating the various network resource object definitions based on telecommunications standards, requirements of service providers, and equipment manufacturers""products to create a master specification or management information base repository of object definitions. The master management information base is accessible by operational and support systems at all levels of management within the telecommunications network.